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Flatscreens are getting bigger and better.

On December 6, LG.Philips LCD Company, a joint venture between Korea's LG Electronics and the Netherlands' Royal Philips, announced a 52" thin-film-transistor liquid crystal display for high definition television. The 52W is the largest TFT-LCD ever demonstrated, and puts the lie to a widespread belief that LCDs are impractical for large screens.

The 52W's 16:9 screen has a resolution of 1920 x 1080—at 2.07 million pixels, better than seven times the level needed for standard definition (SD) television and twice the pixel count in many HDTVs. LG.Philips claims that the 52W also has the world's widest viewing angle, 176°, thanks to a proprietary technology called "Super-In-Plane-Switching" or S-IPS. The large screens will enter mass production in 2003.

Large-format LCD screens offer many advantages over plasma display panels, according to Bruce Berkoff, LG.Philips LCD's executive vice president of marketing. Among them are "lower power consumption, lighter weight, less thickness, higher resolution, and a longer lifetime."

LG.Philips LCD is the world's second-most successful LCD maker, with 35.5% of the market. Sharp Electronics leads the pack with 48.4%. Industry research firm DisplaySearch predicts that the worldwide market for LCD screens will grow from 1.3 million units in 2002 to more than 16.1 million units by 2006, and will be accelerated by digital broadcasting.